Healthy Labels, Not Stealthy Labels

Research suggests that consumers spend only about one second looking at nutrition information when making myriad choices. A parent dashing through the grocery store aisles with kids in tow has to decide, in that one second, which is better: Triscuit vs. Saltines vs. Wheat Thins vs. Ritz? This is why Americans need a simple, standardized and truthful label on the front of all packaged foods.

For a minute, it looked as if we were a step closer to getting it.

In January 2011, the Grocery Manufacturers Association pledged that food manufacturers would start adding nutrition information — on calories, saturated fats, sodium and sugars, as well as nutrients like Vitamin C and calcium — to the front of their packages “within a few months.” This label would be easy to understand, and would help shoppers determine whether a food was healthy or not. Not much happened until September, when the G.M.A. announced that “Facts Up Front” would be the theme for the initiative, and began a second public relations blitz about the forthcoming labels.

Strolling down the aisles of my local supermarket, I saw only a few front-of-the-package labels.

But months later, as I stroll down the aisles of my local supermarket, I see front-of-the-package labels only on a few cereal boxes. The ones on soda cans have information only on calories, and nothing on added sugars. There’s no label on the front of the Chips Ahoy. Can’t find it on the Häagen-Dazs ice cream carton. And there’s nothing on Lay’s potato chip bags.

What we have is a failure to launch. What happened?

In the fall and early winter of 2010, the Food and Drug Administration and the Obama administration were talking with the G.M.A. about developing a voluntary front-of-pack label. At the time I was an adviser to the administration working on Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to reduce childhood obesity, and so took part in the negotiations. The F.D.A. and administration wanted information on calories, salt, sugars and saturated fats. The G.M.A. was willing to agree, but because it worried that this would make some packaged foods look really bad, it also wanted to include positive information on vitamins and minerals. The government balked at that, and instead of coming to an agreement, the G.M.A. canceled the negotiations.

But it knew it had to do something, or risk a more stringent label rule in the future. So it announced its own voluntary label. Once the G.M.A. got the government off its back, though, it seemed to be in no hurry to follow through with the labels. And even when or if it does, the labels will be flawed. There is no reason to include positive information on Vitamin C or fiber along with the crucial information on fats, salt and calories. A lack of fiber doesn’t lead to the same health crisis as an overdose of salt. And including so many facts results in information overload, diluting the label’s impact. A cynic might say that is precisely what the G.M.A. wants.

Others in the industry are moving forward independent of the G.M.A. Last month, Walmart released an interpretative symbol system called “Great for You,” which uses icons to convey a value judgment about the product’s nutrition and allows consumers to make quick choices about healthier foods. This is a step in the right direction. But if every company and grocer goes the independent Walmart way, we could end up with many different, confusing icons.

What we need are simple, standardized icons that can be understood by a shopper in a second or less, located in a consistent place on all packages. No higher math or advanced nutrition knowledge should be required to grasp the icons’ meaning. The information should reflect real serving sizes (canned soup labels regularly give the amount of salt for just half the can, trying to disguise that a whole can contain almost an entire day’s intake of salt). And we should have interpretive symbols telling shoppers simply whether an item is healthy or unhealthy.

This will help consumers make better choices, but even more important, it will encourage food manufacturers to make healthier packaged foods in the first place. In the end, the data we have suggests it is the production of healthier foods, rather than consumers’ making better choices, that will be most effective in combating obesity and promoting health.

After waiting a year, it seems pretty clear that we can’t trust the G.M.A. to do the right thing by the American consumer. When industry fails to voluntarily police itself, then it may just be time for regulation. But regulations require extensive research as well as hard-to-come-by agreement on the effectiveness of interpretive symbols, on the design of the symbols themselves and on the formula to be used to define how healthy each item is. All that will take at least two years, and will most likely be harder on the industry over all. A voluntary government-industry agreement is the better path.

So I’m still hoping that the G.M.A. can come back and negotiate in good faith. We should scrap the current labels, get rid of nutrition information that is not useful, and move forward on improved labels as soon as possible.

I want my Häagen-Dazs to tell me how many calories I am consuming — up front.

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Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and former White House adviser, is a vice provost and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times on a range of topics including health and health policy. Topher Spiro is the vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress.